Irving Howe initiated his letters to Ruth Wisse about Sholem Aleichem by staking his main claim that, based on his own experience of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, he must go against the grain and state that they, like all stories of the Schlemiel (from Chelm to Hershel Ostropolier), have “their undercurrents of darkness.” Throughout Howe’s letter, […]
Do we laugh through tears or do we cry through laughter? The answer to this question or perhaps the question itself are, for Irving Howe, the crux of Jewish identity. For Howe, the few Jews who really “scrutinize” themselves, the Jews who “dare to know” (so to speak), will come to this very question. Howe […]
Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to cast and create comical characters with a schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah […]
It was with great sadness that I learned this morning of the passing of Aharon Appelfeld. He is one of my favorite Israeli novelists and some of his novels have, literally, changed the way I think about the novel and its relationship to history. It also changed the way I looked at the schlemiel character. […]
Since being published last week, Lena Dunham’s recent “Jewish boyfriend or dog” joke for The New Yorker has received enormous attention and most of it has been negative. The first major hit was an article that came out three days ago by Kveller – a site that is written by Jewish women and is acutely […]
In Jean-Claude Carriere’s book, The Secret Language of Film he points out how films were “born silent” and continue to “love silence.” But he makes a major distinction. He argues that, in its beginnings, silent film “wildly gesticulated.” But “over the past sixty years” since its inception, we have something different; namely, the “present inscrutability […]
When people ask me if one can find any characters like the schlemiel in other traditions, I immediately think of Robert Walser. Indeed, I can think of no better example of the schlemiel than in his fiction. I can also think of no better person to write such fiction since he, too, was a schlemiel, […]
In a 1968 Paris Review interview with Harold Flender, I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer, was asked about the schlemiel. However, the name schlemiel wasn’t used in Flender’s question. Rather, Flender uses the word “little man.” His question to Singer and Singer’s response are telling as they suggest a break in the tradition […]
From my own experiences and those of many of my friends, I have learned that many American Jews are perplexed about what it means to be Jewish while others, unfortunately, have become indifferent. Those who are perplexed can turn to many different things for a resolution: some people try to understand their Judaism by turning […]
One of the definitive gestures of the schlemiel is distraction. Nearly all of schlemiels we see in Yiddish literature are, in some way, shape, or form, distracted from the world they are living in or something that, for us, would seem obvious. They are “absent-minded.” One prime example of this kind of distraction would be […]
Schlemiel Theory 